*Drumroll* GiantBomb. Research, watch videos. I understand that video games are expensive these days, but that's no excuse for stealing it so you can "determine its true worth." If saying that helps you sleep at night, so be it. That doesn't make it right."I understand what your saying here mate but, and I'm talking about PC game piracy specifically here, its nearly impossible to know for certain that a game will run at an acceptable level with a low-mid level non-gaming PC. Company of Heroes, STALKER, Team Fortress 2 and Crysis are the last 4 games I was interested in getting for my PC. Out of those Company of Heroes I tried the demo of, loved and bought it, Crysis I tried the demo of and it didn't run at an acceptable frame rate so I didn't buy it, Team Fortress 2 I tried on a free weekend and found it worked ok on the lowest settings. The final game STALKER didn't have a demo at the time, I'm not certain it does now 2bh but I pirated that to try it and the framerate was unaceptable even at the lowest settings (I'm not even very fussy about fram rate) so I deleted the pirated copy and didn't buy the game.
I release I'm probably in the minority in that I pirate games almost exclusivly to test them on this old ass machine but I'd probably buy more games and almost never pirate games if A) there was a demo for EVERY game B) there was some sort of standardisation across PCs. When you look at the miimum spec of a PC I have absolutely no idea what that means. Is the minimum spec going to even get me through the tutorial at a decent frame rate? I have no idea. If I got my PC and it said on the front of the box that it was a level 2 for 2008 games or something and from I could go to a website and see what the game would look and run like on a level 2 machine built in 2008 or something along those lines people would be far more likely to buy games the were only moderately interested in that maybe they would have pirated before.
Again maybe thats just me and my ignorance of PC gaming. My main platform is the Xbox 360 which I know exactly what games will look like and how they will run due to reviews and demos not trial and error. And for the record I've preordered Spore, I know that will run fantastically well on both my machines, so maybe lower emphasis on graphics and more emphasis on inovative gameplay is the answer.
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